THOMAS JEFFERSON woke with the alarm of someone who does not know where he is. The alarm was physical as well as metaphysical. He hadn’t remembered for a moment not only where he was but who he was. He had traveled so many miles. . . . He sighed. He was staring at Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s painting of “Night” on his own sculptured ceiling over his own bed, in his own room in his own Hôtel de Langeac, and not in some Prussian inn lying in his white-linen envelope among strangers. He raised himself on one elbow and stared at the sleeping girl beside him. He had gone to fetch his slave from her rooms as soon as he had arrived in Paris. She was on her side, turned away from him, her long dark hair fanning out from her body. The white sheets darkened her skin, like a pale sky darkens clouds. He lifted the covers from her and slowly pulled them away from her body. Then he bent his bright head and ran his tongue along the delicate backbone. The taste of honey and pine hit the back of his throat.
“Mon Dieu …” he murmured, and sank back into his satin pillows. Possessively he drew the girl closer to him and arranged her head on his naked chest. She slept. Without waking her, he caressed the tangled hair. There was a small crescent-shaped scar in the silky down of the beginning of her hairline. A dim recollection made it seem that this scar had something to do with him, but he couldn’t remember what. He tenderly rubbed the slightly raised whiteness of it with the tips of his fingers.
Landscape after landscape rushed before him as if he were riding in the jostling coaches and carriages of his Rhine journey.
He had described to the girl again and again the long, lonely voyage through the Low Countries to the north and finally Prussia and the Rhine Valley. His description of the vast, magical Black Forest had transported the young girl into a world of dragons, princesses, and fairy tales. His imaginary carriage slowed now, so that innumerable scenes of rustic beauty floated before his eyes in stately sequence. On the second of April he had arrived at Düsseldorf and had gone straight to the painting gallery. It was there that he had seen the Van der Werff painting that had so moved him: the Biblical story of Sarah giving the slave Hagar to Abraham. That same afternoon he had written to Sally in Paris. Had it really been a sign, he wondered?
He straightened a lock of her hair. He was a rational man. It was unreasonable, he thought, loving for once what he saw and felt without wanting or trying to give a reason, and not caring much if there was one. Sometimes her face took him back to his happiest days. His eyes rested again on the sleeping slave. Her youth, the deepness and serenity of her sleep, stirred him. To be that young … Love is never a surprise to the young; but to him! He almost laughed, then remembered she slept. He shifted position carefully and drew her closer to him. After Düsseldorf, he had thought of her often with a growing sense of fatality. Was it not incredible that she was here at all, in Paris, in his arms? Was it not strange and unaccountable the circumstances of her arrival here, of her very birth? That fateful Wayles legacy so intertwined with the past, and now with the future? Future? What possible future except hate and guilt could they possibly have, he reminded himself.
He closed his eyes and drifted back to the Rhine Valley, sailing down the wide flat ribbon of it from Cologne to Hanau and Heidelberg. His return had had a dreamlike and hurried aspect about it after Düsseldorf. By the middle of April he had been in Strasbourg, where he had recrossed the Rhine into France. He had hurried then, remembering for the first time the bitter toil and poverty of the German peasants. Why had he suddenly been so touched by the women—disheveled, worn beyond their years?
His slave stirred and opened her eyes. The low morning sun caught their golden color and flecked green and brown into them. His heart pounded as she reached for him.
His face still held such terror for her. She pulled back from the lips that had brushed hers and looked into the hooded and melancholy eyes with their fair brows, and then at the wide mouth with its slightly upturned corners. Her master’s thick, wavy hair fell around his shoulders. There was a mat of reddish hair on his chest. Sally Hemings’ eyes took in the mysterious stubble of red beard and the fine age-lines around the eyes and the stern mouth. There were marks of age at his throat, a slight indentation of flesh, and suddenly she felt a piercing flash of pity for him.